“With joy you will draw water from the wells of
salvation.” To me verse three here is
one of the most beautiful verses of Scripture there is. There is just so much tucked away in it. I’m a bit at a loss as to where to
start. So I’ll start with saying who it
is written to.
In 586 BCE the Lord God of the Israelites, Yahweh,
decided he had had enough with the wickedness of his people. They were idolatrous to the point of their
kings sacrificing their firstborn sons to other gods by burning them in fire in
order to have power. They were
idolatrous to the point of feasting all the time. The rich were getting richer by abusing the
poor and taking all they could to themselves.
The temple in Jerusalem was nothing more than a sham symbol of
status.
The Israelites simply were not being the people that
Yahweh had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt to be. They weren’t the people who by living
according to the Commandments they would be a loving community who visibly
reflected the very nature of the one true God Yahweh to the nations. There wasn’t peace in their midst. Instead, they just looked like one more of
the nations and a wicked one at that.
So, Yahweh finally put his foot down (finally because this had been
going on for a couple of centuries) and he sent the Babylonians and they
destroyed Jerusalem and levelled the temple and carried off into exile anybody
who was anybody.
The Babylonians took them back to Babylon where most
of them grew quite comfortable, except for a small remnant who just couldn’t
shake the desire to return to the Land, who couldn’t help but to believe the
prophets through whom Yahweh was promising that he was going to bring them back
to Judea, to Jerusalem, and they would rebuild.
It is to this small, faithful remnant that Isaiah here writes and tells
them that the day is coming when they will go back and when they do they will
make a public confession shouting aloud with great joy their thanks and praise
because God has not just saved them but has himself become their salvation. Yahweh the Holy One of Israel himself will be
in their midst comforting them. They
will say “Surely God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid. The LORD, the LORD himself is my strength and
my defence. He has become my salvation.”
God himself is our salvation. That is a pretty deep thing to say. Salvation is probably the most misunderstood
and offensively used word in the Christian arsenal of snobnoxery. Coming from the Southern Bible belt in the US
I grew up with the idea that salvation was simply that God has given a “Get Out
of Hell Free” card to those who had the smarts enough to take the advice to
believe in Jesus, come to church, and live good. I don’t know what you folks have been taught,
but what I grew up believing was salvation isn’t what the Bible teaches and
especially not what the Old Testament teaches.
Isaiah here saying “Surely God is my salvation” he surely has no concept
at all of going to Hell when he dies because he is a sinner and therefore God
has saved him from that. There is no
Hell in the Hebrew vocabulary. There is
a place called Sheol where the dead are held but it is not the fiery place of
torment you find in Dante’s Inferno. The
concept just is not there.
Salvation to Isaiah and his hearers was God acting in
history in the actual events of their lives to save his people from
circumstances that are oppressive and unbecoming of the people of God. It is deliverance right in the now not an
after life thing. Salvation is what
happens when God restores his people to a right relationship with himself. In the case here in Isaiah, salvation would
be God bringing his people back from exile in Babylon to the Land he promised
them free of external oppressors where they would be free to live as his
people. In the bigger picture salvation
is a relationship of trust in and commitment to God lived out in a community of
people that is a response to God’s faithfulness. Salvation is when God has created a community
of people on Earth who live together in such a way as to truly reflect his
image. I know I’m getting deep her so
I’ll back off with saying this; we need to stop thinking of salvation as an
after life event and start thinking of it in terms of what Jesus is doing here
in our midst which is in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit he is making
this little small church out in Hobokkenville to be a communion of people who
love one another as selflessly as he has loved us each and given his life for
us.
Let’s get back to Isaiah. Isaiah compares salvation to a well from
which we will joyfully draw water. Let’s
try to picture this image. The word for “well”
can mean a springhead or any source of water that bubbles up from in the
ground. We will draw from the source,
the sprenghead of salvation. And what is
water out there in the desert? Between
Babylon and Jerusalem is a whole lot of barren, rocky, dry wasteland. There’s no rivers or ponds or anything like
that. For the people who live there
water is nothing short of the source of life itself. It’s that powerful of an image. No water, no life. You die…unless you eat the leaves of the
Acacia tree like camels do. Trying to
live in that kind of desert wilderness is extremely difficult. You need a source of water. Such is life.
So Isaiah is here creating an image of being in a
wasteland and finding an unexpected source of water. With joy we will draw life from the very
source of life and its salvation. And he
says this is what God is for us. He says
God has become my salvation. God
himself, his presence with us each is the deep well of salvation from which we
draw life. This verse just gobsmacks me
with its straightforward simplicity on where to find true, indeed, eternal life
if I can through Apostle John in here.
At 17:3 of his Gospel he says that eternal life is not going to heaven
when you die but rather knowing God and the one he has sent; Jesus.
Let me do a little word play with the Hebrew word for
“salvation” that is neither here nor there but…
The word itself is Yeshua or Joshua as we would say in English. If you remember Joshua was the one who led
the Israelites into the Promised Land.
Isaiah may quite literally be telling this about to return to the Land
remnant of faithful Israelites that God himself is their Joshua rather than
their salvation. But that’s a topic for
another day. The Greek way of saying the
name Yeshua or Joshua is Jesus. Jesus’
name quite literally means salvation.
Now, I’m not going to be the first to go looking for
Jesus in the Old Testament. The early
church did this “religiously”. But, it
is not a stretch for us to look at what Isaiah is saying here to this about to
return to the Land faithful remnant of Israelites in exile in Babylon and read
a little Jesus into it so that it says to us: “Surely God is my Jesus; I will
trust and not be afraid. The LORD, the LORD
himself is my strength and my defence; he has become my Jesus. With joy we can draw water from the wells of
Jesus.”
Jesus is salvation.
If we are looking for a source of life apart from our relationship with
him in and through the Holy Spirit, a relationship in which we share his very
relationship with God the Father, then we are mining for fool’s gold and not
drinking the living water.
Let me close with saying a word about drawing the water. We have to put some effort into this. We have to draw the water to be able to drink
it. Too many Christians go about their
faith life just dancing around the well in the desert and never drinking the water. We Presbyterians, we’re real good at not even
dancing around the well. We just say, “Yeah,
there’s a well there, but it’s our duty to keep walking or we’ll never get to
the Promised Land.” We can do churchy
things, things we believe its our duty to do for “the church” and all the while
not be drinking the living water of Jesus in prayer and Bible study with each
other. We need to draw the water and
drink it. Developing a deep prayer life,
meeting together to pray for one another and to study the Bible together and of
course eating. These are how we draw
from the well of salvation…and there’s a joy in it, you know. With joy we will draw that water.
Jesus, our salvation, is with us. We are bound to him in the Holy Spirit whom
he has sent to live in us. Pull out your
Bibles and read them at home and talk about what you’re discovering there. There’s not a one of us too old or too you or
too important to do that. Draw from the
well of salvation, from Jesus and joy will come. Amen.
